BIOGRAPHY: eARLY LIFE
Born Audrey Kathleen Ruston on Rue Keyenveld/Keienveldstraat in
Ixelles/Elsene, a municipality in Brussels Belgium, she was the only child of
the Englishman Joseph Victor Anthony Ruston and his second wife, the former
Baroness Ella van Heemstra, a Dutch aristocrat, who was a daughter of a former
governor of Dutch Guiana. Her father later prepended the surname of his maternal
grandmother, Kathleen Hepburn, to the family's and her surname became
Hepburn-Ruston. She had two half-brothers, Jonkheer Arnoud Robert Alexander
'Alex' Quarles van Ufford and Jonkheer Ian Edgar Bruce Quarles van Ufford, by
her mother's first marriage to a Dutch nobleman, Jonkheer Hendrik Gustaaf Adolf
Quarles van Ufford. She was a descendant of King Edward III of England and Mary
Queen of Scots' consort, James Hepburn, 4th Earl of Bothwell, from whom
Katharine Hepburn may have also descended. This made Audrey a distant cousin of
Diana, Princess of Wales, who thought of her as her favorite actress. This also
made her related to the other notable distant cousins including Humphrey Bogart
and Prince Rainier III of Monaco.
Hepburn's father's job with a British insurance company meant the family
travelled often between Brussels, England, and The Netherlands. From 1935 to
1938, Hepburn attended a boarding school for girls in Kent. In 1935, her parents
divorced and her father, a Nazi sympathizer, left the family. (Both parents were
members of the British Union of Fascists in the mid-1930s according to Unity
Mitford, a friend of Ella van Heemstra and a follower of Adolf Hitler.) She
later called her father's abandonment the most traumatic moment of her life.
Years later, she located him in Dublin through the Red Cross. Although he
remained emotionally detached, she stayed in contact with him and supported him
financially until his death. In 1939, her mother moved her and her two
half-brothers to their grandfather's home in Arnhem in the Netherlands. Ella
believed the Netherlands would be safe from German attack. Hepburn attended the
Arnhem Conservatory from 1939 to 1945, where she trained in ballet along with
the standard school curriculum. In 1940, the Germans invaded the Netherlands.
During the Nazi occupation, Hepburn adopted the pseudonym Edda van Heemstra,
modifying her mother's documents because an 'English sounding' name was
considered dangerous. This was never her legal name. The name Edda was a version
of her mother's name Ella. By 1944, Hepburn had become a proficient ballerina.
She secretly danced for groups of people to collect money for the Dutch
resistance. She later said, "the best audience I ever had made not a single
sound at the end of my performance."
After the Allied landing on D-Day, living conditions grew worse. During the
Dutch famine over the winter of 1944, the Germans confiscated the Dutch people's
limited food and fuel supply for themselves. People starved and froze to death
in the streets. Hepburn and many others resorted to making flour out of tulip
bulbs to bake cakes and biscuits. Arnhem was devastated by Allied
artillery fire that was part of Operation Market Garden. Hepburn's uncle and her
mother's cousin were shot in front of Hepburn for being part of the Resistance.
Hepburn's half-brother Ian van Ufford spent time in a German labour camp.
Suffering from malnutrition, Hepburn developed acute anemia, respiratory
problems, and oedema.
In 1991, Hepburn said "I have memories. More than once I was at the station
seeing trainloads of Jews being transported, seeing all these faces over the top
of the wagon. I remember, very sharply, one little boy standing with his parents
on the platform, very pale, very blond, wearing a coat that was much too big for
him, and he stepped on to the train. I was a child observing a child."
Hepburn also noted the similarities between herself and Anne Frank: "I was
exactly the same age as Anne Frank. We were both ten when war broke out and
fifteen when the war finished. I was given the book in Dutch, in galley form, in
1946 by a friend. I read it – and it destroyed me. It does this to many people
when they first read it but I was not reading it as a book, as printed pages.
This was my life. I didn't know what I was going to read. I've never been the
same again, it affected me so deeply."
"We saw reprisals. We saw young men put against the wall and shot and they'd
close the street and then open it and you could pass by again. If you read the
diary, I've marked one place where she says 'five hostages shot today'. That was
the day my uncle was shot. And in this child's words I was reading about what
was inside me and is still there. It was a catharsis for me. This child who was
locked up in four walls had written a full report of everything I'd experienced
and felt."
These times were not all bad and she was able to enjoy some of her childhood.
Again drawing parallels to Anne Frank's life, Hepburn said "This spirit of
survival is so strong in Anne Frank's words. One minute she says 'I'm so
depressed'. The next she is longing to ride a bicycle. She is certainly a symbol
of the child in very difficult circumstances, which is what I devote all my time
to. She transcends her death."
One way in which Audrey Hepburn passed the time was by drawing. Some of her
childhood artwork can be seen today.
When the country was liberated, United Nations Relief and Rehabilitation
Administration trucks followed. Hepburn said in an interview she ate an entire
can of condensed milk and then got sick from one of her first relief meals
because she put too much sugar in her oatmeal. This experience is what led her
to become involved in UNICEF later in life.
Credit: Wikipedia